"I'd like to buy a vowel." Most of us in the `civilized' world are familiarwith this oft-heard sentence in a popular TV game show. For those who arenot, it is a Hangman-like game where contestants identify words in severalcategories by guessing their letters. Correctly guessing a consonant helpsin winning a prize, while one has to pay to guess a vowel. Imagine playingthis game and getting words having all five vowels? That wouldn't be veryexciting where you have to squander all your cash in buying the vowels. Tomake it more tolerable, we've selected this week words that have all thevowels once, but only once. And the vowels can be in any order. To seethe words with all the vowels, once and only once, AND in order, see thearchives for Oct 1997: http://wordsmith.org/awad/themes.html.

I was looking in the AWAD archives, hoping for inspiration for starting a new thread. I came upon the following bysheer coincidence. I apologize for the extreme length, but we can't link to any single entry, and it can be tedious to find one among the entire list. I think there is a lot here that people will find worth commenting on.==========================================================

I didn't intend to send a followup on today's mailing butlooking at the volume and enthusiasm of replies, I couldn'tkeep without sharing them with you.

Many suggested the words facetious, abstemious and arseniousall of which have all the vowels occuring only once and inorder. Among those who sent in one or more of these words are:Linguaphiles Martha (albion.edu), Pete Cottrels (umd.edu),Zach (att.com), Marc Picard (concordia.ca), Brian Battles(arrl.org), Mortnsue (aol.com), Garthe Nelson (ucsb.edu),C. Sudhama (mot.com), Evan Robinson (mit.edu), Ullas Gargi(psu.edu), Guy Jacobs (ukans.edu), David Powers (flinders.edu.au)Miriam Shlesinger (biu.ac.il, Israel) and Manojkumar Saranathan(washington.edu). In addition, Saranathan came up with thisword with all the vowels in reverse order: duoliteral.

Linguaphile Tim Lee from datapath.co.uk recalled a vacationhe took years ago in California, where he saw the giant red-woods,the sequoia trees. He points out that "Not only does 'sequoia'have all the vowels and only once, it also has only two consonants."

Now, how about a crash course in French? Linguaphile Jean Wilmottehailing from ucl.ac.be ("be" is the country code for Belgium)wrote to inform that jalousie has a second meaning in French --jealousy. It had me thinking what jealousy had to do with venetianblinds. But I didn't have to wait for long. Manfred Borzechowskiof alcatel.de (de = Germany) piped in with the etymology. Hereis a peek at the historical roots of the word:

Such blinds served in old Arabic ages to protect from being seen when having an intimate relationship, so that nobody else would become jealous.

Frits Stuurman from ruu.nl (nl = Netherlands, which incidentally, iswritten as Nederland in Netherlands/Nederland/Holland) was remindedof James Joyce's Ulysses where "there is also something aboutaeiou = a.e. [initials of one of Joyce's friends, I seem to remember]I owe you;"

Bruce Nevin of lightstream.com greped (grep is computerese for search)in /usr/dict/words and sent a list of 54 words with all the vowels.Did I say all the vowels? A couple of linguaphiles expressed doubtwhether I was forgetting `y' when I said the word `jalousie' has allthe vowels in it. Garthe of ucsb.edu had probably already thought ofit. He wrote: "the most remarkable word of this kind that I've foundis `facetious' which not only has all the vowels exactly once but alsoin alphabetical order. It can even accommodate the `sometimes y'clause with the addition of `ly' to form `facetiously', still inalphabetical order."

discussion recently about exactly where it is from which Anu reigns so gloriously.

(Heaving a great West-of-Irelad sigh) Yes, 'twas I. I tried extrapolating The Glorious One's home station location from the article in Smithsonian. Given Anu's note about being on shores of Lake Erie .... seems I was wrong! (Pouring ashes over head emoticon) Sooooo -- I give!Wow

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